Tag: Toastmasters

To Sleep, perchance to dream

TimeHorse April 24, 2024 No Comments

Last year, I read the book Outlive by Peter Attia, MD in my Science Book Club, and although it is cliché, this book did indeed change my life. The TLDR is simply this: to live a healthy you need four pillars of living today to be ready for tomorrow: improved strength, good balance, cardiovascular improvements, and sleep! I have 10 lb / 4.5 kg weights I need to start pumping one of these days for strength. I need to do more yoga, like Saturdays at 11:00 in my apartment, but alas that’s during my Saturday Morning Review. But, for cardio, I climb all 15 flights every time I leave my apartment, typically at lease once a day, and have made a rule to never take the elevator up when I can find the staircase (though I do take it down).

As for sleep, I am epicly failing and it’s really getting to me. But, to fully lay this story out, let’s go back to March of 2024.

Eclipse Planning

I had been planning for the 2024 eclipse for years. I even wrote a presentation about it which I shared with my Toastmasters and Westminster Astronomy Society, Inc (WASI). In it, I talk about how back in 2023 I tried to get a hotel room on Lake Buchanan in Texas, and wasn’t able, but found this state park, right in the centerline of the Eclipse path, in the driest part of the county, just outside of Austin, TX. I worked out with my new job at CACI (which, BTW, is one of the best jobs I’ve ever had and a wonderful place to work and will always be my scheduling priority) that I could change my work location to Austin for the first two weeks of April 2024, and then booked a hotel in Cedar Park so that I would be close to work (actually two hotels were books and I only chose which one I would stay at in March), and got a TxTag so I could use the toll roads around Austin.

I spent March giving that presentation, scheduling a month of Green Pill Podcast episodes and posts (so I wouldn’t have to deal with them in Austin) and cleared my calendar for those two week, only allowing the most important commitments to bother me on my working-vacation. Since I was doing this myself, I used my own money to stay at the hotels, and wishing for adventure, I decided to take #NoSO2TeslaP三D down. (Fortunately, FSD (Supervised) V12 dropped just before I left.) And, I checked my Doctor Who watch log and prepared to watch the mostly missing The Mythmakers on the way there, The Dalek Masterplan while in Austin, and The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve on the way back. My dad contacted me about borrowing his DJI Camera and I scheduled to pick it up two days before I left, the same day I tried to help a pregnant camper with the Green Cab group I’m a part of—which didn’t work out because I just couldn’t pick up the camera and get to the patient in time.

I put in my contacts and readied myself for the long drive.

Driving to Austin

I got up at 03:00 to watch my daily Doctor Who, and left at 04:00 on Friday, March 29. On the way, I attended many work meeting en route and nearly killing my hotspot fast-speed limit on the way. I first hit the Raphine, VA supercharger around 06:30, well before work began. Then, I drove to Atkins, VA, leaving around 10:30, and got my work computer set up for my work meetings. Around noon CDT—I’d crossed the time zone—there was some serious stop-and-go traffic on I40, in Kodak, TN, just outside of Knoxville, and I got rear-ended by an uninsured driver who didn’t leave me his name—I still have to get this fixed. I pulled into the Knoxville, TN supercharger about a half-hour later. I then attended the rest of my work meetings before arriving at Nashville/Charlotte, TN around 15:30, made it to Jackson, TN around 18:00. From there, I was lucky the Brinkley, AR was next to a hotel so I was able to sleep for 6 hours after charging my car to 100%.

I got back on the road around 04:00, arriving in Little Rock, AR around 05:00 with about 60%. I then hit Nash, AR before finally hitting Nash, TX, just outside Texarkana, around 07:15. I then drove a bit west of Dallas to the Royse City, TX supercharger at a Buc-ee’s, arriving around 09:45. I hit Abbott, TX around noon. Because I made such good time, and was looking to get to the hotel before check-in, I decided to instead head toward the Lake Buchanan park to scope it out for Eclipse photos, posting photos to instagram without revealing my location to keep it from being swarmed—and allow me to change my mind. Finally, I made it to the Cedar Park Supercharger, queued for a charge, and checked into my hotel around 17:30.

Working Vacation in Austin

Fortunately, I was able to cancel all my Saturday Morning Review meetings on transit days, committed to on the second Sunday morning there (the first Sunday was Easter and I just spent the day doing touristy things) and on my trip back to The Hourlings, attended my Reston Writers over Zoom (including one on the highway coming back from the Eclipse), attended my EVA/DC board meeting, my WASI meeting, a regularly scheduled Toastmasters meeting, and the Division E Toastmasters Evaluation Contest! I really didn’t want to participate in that while I was on vacation but I kind of fell into it by winning in March, so my Saturday morning before the Eclipse was toast. And that is, for me, a paired down commitment. I wanted to spend as much time as I could in Austin and focus on that, and not worry about what I would deal with when I got back, just in time to run the Science Book Club meeting in person. And I had to wash my car, twice.

I’m not going to talk about my actual eclipse experience here, just that I was not able to view the bats under the Congress Bridge in Austin and the Toastmasters contest and Testing the DJI Camera with a solar filter—which I hadn’t had a chance to test until that point—as well as getting enough charge for my ride, meant I really wasn’t able to do any tourism the weekend before the eclipse, and I was exhausted. But, I did get a call from our Toastmasters Area New Club Director about starting a club at CACI. Unfortunately, my reading glasses broke, the lens fell out, and I had to replace them, looking in H.E.B. and Walmart. I spent about a half-an-hour on the phone while I selected a pair I really liked for about $30.

I spend my last days in Austin meeting some of my awesome Austin colleagues, and attending drinks with the head of the office that Friday night, causing me to go to bed late.

Returning to Virginia

I got up at 03:00 on Saturday, 13 April, watched my daily Doctor Who, finished my Orange Juice, and hit the road around 04:30. I was too tired to take pictures at my first charging stop in Corsicana, TX, driving through the back roads of Texas. But I did get photos in Sulphur Springs, TX, in Hope, AR, in Little Rock, AR (again), in Memphis/Germantown, TN, in Dickson, TN, in Nashville/Charlotte, TN (again), and stopped at the Crossville Buc-ee’s. Unfortunately, the last stop was at a buc-ee’s and because I have mean old Tesla Insurance, it was 22:00, and I couldn’t drive anymore and had to sleep in my vehicle. My air mattress didn’t properly inflate for the first hour but, around 01:00 I hit the head in Buc-ee’s and got it properly inflated, getting a net of about 5 sleep before hitting the road again at 04:00.

I crossed the timezone and made it to Bristol, VA, at a lovely Royal Farms, right on the Tennessee border, around 07:30, just as the sun was rising. The sun looked amazing as I drove up I81 but when I got to Washington County, VA, I got my first speeding ticket in over a decade, all while going the same speed as the traffic around me. I guess the county is short on cash. Anyway, that delayed me arriving at the Sheetz station in Salem, VA, where I was subsequently late setting up the Hourlings Zoom, burning through the last of my hotspot bandwidth before they throttled me because the Sheetz wifi didn’t work. I got pulled over one more time outside of Salem because I accidently breezed passed a cop on FSD but I apologized as I didn’t get to the car and override in time, and he forgave me. Best cop ever! I’m glad he was safe. I then made it to the Mt. Jackson, VA supercharger around 14:45, which I had previously visited on my trip down Shenandoah National Park last Autumn—I was almost home! I didn’t have time to take a much needed shower, but I did have time to get to the car wash before attending my 17:00 meeting at the Panera. I finally had my shower when I got home, and I slept—fitfully.

A Killer Workweek

The main problem with not getting enough sleep is my productivity drops off. Combine that with 2 days of driving and looking at my calendar and seeing events not just 2 days the following week, not just 3 days. Not even 4 days, but 5 days, one every day of the week leading up to Earth Day and that weekend before Earth Day being chocablock with events too, about 3 per day! Combine that with 43 hours of work and you can see why I’m very frazzled.

My first day at work I did my best to move to my new cube (we moved cubes the day I got back) and was so tired, when I tried to recycle my soda and sandwich bag, I had the soda and my glasses in one hand and the sandwich back in the other, intending to recycle the soda and the bag but forgetting the glasses were in my hand too. When I tossed the soda bottle and everything else in my hand, I was confused to see the bag in my other hand. I stared at the trash, wondering what else was in that hand if not the sandwich bag. When I got home, I realized it was my reading glasses. I had to rush home to run Reston Writers’ Review, and I started cursing abominably because I was late and I needed my glasses to read the pieces and write my notes. I met one of my writers in the lobby and he tried to calm me down, but I had to trudge all the way up to my apartment, fetch my old, cellophane taped glasses to run the meeting. I then had to drive back to work, dig through trash, unsuccessfully, and then buy a cheap replacement in Walmart, driving home past the high insurance 22:00 point! That was just day one!?

The rest of the week wasn’t much better. Tuesday, I drove to Columbia for the April Tesla Tuesdays. Wednesday I met with my therapist, missing about half of a work meeting because I couldn’t get sound to work in the car, then drove to the EVA/DC monthly meeting. On Thursday I had Toastmasters, where I was the General Evaluator. And on Friday, I drove down to Regency Furniture Stadium for a secret Tesla event! Meanwhile, at work, my branch had gone out of sync with the main branch, and I had to soft reset it to get it back in sync, but when I did, I forgot to copy all my old commit messages, which had all my notes from my work up until that point. Again, I need sleep because my productivity sinks when I’m tired.

Insane Weekend

Next, I look at my weekend schedule for the first time because, when could I have looked at it sooner. I had a Tesla event in at the Starr Brewery at The Perch (to see a CyberTruck but I saw one in Texarkana so I was good), another in Clarksville Common, and a cosplay event in Ellicott City. I decided to attend all three but I screwed up royally because I forgot to pay for and get a ticket to the Cosplay event, and didn’t check the web page for where the munchie squad would be so I ended up crashing, uninvited, and almost got kicked out of the group which I had been one of the founding members. And thus, I wasn’t able to obtain any photos of that event. And that was just Saturday.

One Sunday, I had a writing seminar with The Hourlings, and then an event in Herndon to promote vegan and sustainable living. I attended the last two hours of the Herndon event, since I was double-booked, then went home for the movie discussion with the Maryland Science Book Club. I was going to meet my friend Lisa that evening but, since she was organizing a very important event taking place today, which I sadly can’t make because of work, we agreed that we were both too busy to make that happen. But, I hope to see her Saturday!

Overscheduling and Undersleeping

Needless to say I was even more exhausted after all that and was happy to cancel the Monday night Reston Writers meeting, quite sleepless, even forgetting my daily weigh-in! I went from a week where every day I had an event to a week where I only had one evening event. Bliss? No, because I have fallen behind with my work and my boss has noticed and put me on warning in our quarterly touchpoints. This is very not good. So, I’m going to shut up now, and get back to work because nothing, but nothing, right now, in my life is more important to me than my job!

My therapist sent my an article which exemplifies my conundrum: How to Stop Overscheduling Yourself.

Take care gentle reader and remember, tomorrow is another day, and another chance to get a good night’s sleep!

The Hourlings Podcast—Episode 3: Finding the Time

TimeHorse November 18, 2020 1 Comment

For this episode, I’m back, but our intrepid host Martin Wilsey was unable to attend so the Toastmaster extraordinaire David Keener to host us as we talk about how to find time between work, and home, and all the other things you have to do with life. Believe me, I barely even find the time to update this site, never mind write.

Another Finely Structured meeting, if I do say so myself.

I hope you find the time to watch it and keep writing. I hope to see you next week!

18 Years and thanks for all the Fleets

TimeHorse June 16, 2020 No Comments

Today I tendered my official resignation with the Naval Research Laboratory. I worked at the Laboratory for 18 years, under three Presidents and many Congresses. In that time, I pushed for at work EV Charging in the FAST Act, I started the NRL EV Group (link accessible within NRL), I sang with Polly and the Saccharides (no link available), and I even gave some Toastmasters speeches (NRL Link).

I very much enjoyed my time there and really am sad to go but I have been having so many problems paying for #CO2Fre and its maintenance that I have no choice but to accept a new job in the private sector. My only other solace—besides finally getting to write code again—is that I can finally use a part of my McGill degree that I’ve not been able to exercise beyond writing fiction.

Thus, it’s not so much an end, but a new beginning. And who knows what the future may bring! After all, I would like to return to Federal Service on day and accrue at least two more years to get my FERS to 1.1%. The only thing for sure is I’m a lot less available as a coder now.

I Am Irate

Google ate me email

TimeHorse March 24, 2020 2 Comments

From about 2020-03-23T14:30:00Z (10:30 am, Monday) to about 2020-03-23T23:30:00Z (7:30 pm, Monday), Google was redirecting all my email and either bouncing it or deleting it.

I Am Irate
Too angry for words!

Let me repeat, google deleted or bounced my email for Nine Hours, as a part of the setup of my setup for a paid Google Apps account. The setup for these accounts are a bit weird. They require you to create a new google entity with your own company URL. Fortunately, I have multiple domains I own and maintain, including this one, TimeHorse.com.

I probably should have used my writing group domain, RestonWriters.org. After all, the whole reason I wanted to get a paid Google account is because Meetup was moving to Online-Only meetings, following the outbreak of SARS-COV-2, and I needed a tool that allowed for video conferencing.

Skype was a non-starter. For one thing, it’s great for person-to-person communications, but for group chats, it has this annoying habit of muting everyone except the current speaker and you have to wait until that speaker stops to get a word in edgewise. My understanding is WhatsApp has the same problem.

Meetup actually suggested using Google Hangouts or Zoom. I happen to like Zoom. I use it for my regular NPVIC Grassroots strategy meetings and for Toastmasters and it’s always worked great. Zoom does support up to a hundred participants, both free and Pro. The only problem is, each of those Zoom sessions are either limited to the free forty-minute block or are using an up-to-24-hour Zoom Pro Account. Since most of my Meetups are at least an hour, breaking meeting up into forty-minute chunks would be tedious. And, at $14.99 a month, the professional account is well out of my price range.

Just before the first week of Virtual meetings began, my writing colleagues and I, including Elizabeth Hayes, who runs The Hourlings, tested both free Zoom and Google Hangout. Despite being limited to ten people, we decided on Google Hangout and I mapped it to our official Virtual Meeting URL.

Ten people worked fine for Reston Writers and for the Saturday Morning Review. The Saturday Morning Review actually worked out quite well because Meetup, despite suggesting we move to a virtual platform, still won’t let you delete the venue from your event and mark it as virtual, which, when editing events can cause some confusion. But when the Library cancelled all our events, I just deleted them all from the Meetup Calendar, and recreated them with no Venue and just announced them as occurring in Cyberspace.

Stay with me folks, I’m getting to the email…

As Sunday approached, I new ten participants wouldn’t be enough. Google Hangout would be fine for Bewie Bevy of Brainy Books and Saturday Morning Review, and likely The Science Book Club, as they all usually have fewer than ten participants for each meeting. The Hourlings, on the other hand, often had twelve, and sometimes as many as sixteen!

I new Zoom was $14.99 a month, but I read that Google App accounts could up the number of participants to twenty-five. Unfortunately my 2TB Google Drive account didn’t qualify. I had to get a Google Apps account.

And that’s where my troubles began.

At first, I could only sign up for the $12 per month account, even though I’d read it could be had for $6. Since the setup has a fortnight trial period, I didn’t worry about the financial discrepancy. I set up the account with my business email address for TimeHorse, LLC. I associated it with with that email, it connected to my Gandi Registrar, and my account was ready to go. I created a Google Hangout and assigned it to the Virtual Meeting URL, hoping it would allow twenty-five. The plan was to use it with the Hourlings to verify that fact.

It failed! We still could only get ten people into the meetup despite it being a paid account.

Unfortunately, since Monday I’ve been on Weather and Safety Leave from work because my Telework agreement was revoked, but that’s a story for another day as this post is long as it is! However, it did allow me to speak to Google and they suggested I try Google Meet. Meet was included with all Google App paid accounts, and it would allow for up to a hundred people and could be as long as I needed. Also, I could downgrade to the $6 per month account and I would still be able to use it. I thus downgraded.

We tried it with Reston Writers Review and it worked wonderfully. We had up to twelve connections simultaneously! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

At around 10:30 am, that Monday, after chatting with Google, I was examining my Google Apps account more closely. It was telling me I had one last step I needed to complete: integrate me email with Gmail.

Stop
Stop, do not pass Go. You’re done!

That’s when my troubles began. You see, what this innocuous, turn-key step says it does is it says it sets up GMail for your company. What it actually does is obliterate all the MX Records (email routing information) of your DNS (Internet routing information) Zone File (routing configuration file) on Gandi and replace it with MX Records that point to Google. The setup wizard doesn’t actually tell you this and I’m totally oblivious.

At current writing, I have 188 forwarded email addresses set up on Gandi with their MX Servers. One of those is my business email, the one Google took over and is my Google Apps login. That’s the email google set up as the official email address used in GMail. Once the GMail setup goes through and I send an email from the GMail interface to my personal email address on the timehorse.com domain.

It never arrives. All day long, I watch my email and, strangely, nothing arrives after 10:30 in the morning. I refresh and refresh, and it’s still nothing. Where have all my emails gone?

It’s not until I’m setting up for Reston Writers that I decide to contact Google about this. I’m crazy-busy setting up the Google Meet, opening up the pieces we’d be reviewing on my computer, and, simultaneously, chatting with Google, trying to figure out why I’m not receiving any email.

Eventually, Google Tech Support starts talking about MX Records and a chill runs down my spine. As you probably gathered by now, I am well versed in DNS records and Zone File manipulation. I even have a Python script which updates my DNS A Record when the IP Address for this server changes.

With trepidation, I logged into my Gandi account and saw the damage. Google had modified my Zone file and added a bunch of strange new MX Records pointing to Google. They had nuked all my Gandi Email forward since they’d redirected all email traffic to google. As google only had one account registered on the domain, timehorse.com, namely my business email address, every other email address I possessed was either being deleted or bounced by google!

Fortunately, Gandi’s Email Forwarding page provides a warning when the Zone file doesn’t point to their email server, listing the correct MX Record settings to use Gandi as the mail hosting server. I quickly commented out the Google MX Records and pasted in the Gandi MX Records around 7:30 pm, in the middle of my Reston Writers meeting.

Needless to say, I was miffed that I could not give my full attention to my writers during our weekly writing gettogether. But it’s good I finally did figure out the disastrous actions committed by Google after only nine hours, and not a day or more.

I may never know what was contained in those nine hours of lost emails. I suppose there is one blessing, though. I get too much email already and still have dozens of unread messages I’m desperately trying to catch up on. One Covidapolis, novel-length email after another from every business under the sun. STFU companies, you’re all doing the same thing and I don’t like reading the same message again, and again, and again! You have a plan, that’s all I need to know!

Maybe Google was doing me a favor?

In the end, I was able to solve the problem because I got skills and I’m available for hire!

Persuasive Influencer: Level 1: Evaluation

TimeHorse March 5, 2020 1 Comment

Today I evaluated an absolutely wonderful fellow Toastmaster. Rick Halstead is no novice to Toastmasters, but today was his Ice Breaker. That’s because anyone in ToastMasters these days is now using the Pathways system to progress through their journey and Rick, though an old hand and excellent Toastmaster, had yet to start his Pathways journey. I was very honored to be his evaluator when he took this first step in a new direction.

I took an Uber to the meeting as I had leftover credits from Tesla and #CO2Fre needed an update, but I’ll write more about that tomorrow. It was close, but I arrived just on time. I was able to convey Rick’s wishes to make sure he didn’t embellish too much and advised him afterwards how you could use a little more embellishment to his advantage, including a summersault. But overall, Rick was very hard to evaluate as there was so little fault with his to all intents and purposes perfect speech. Spend most of my time in fact rattling off all the things he did right like dynamics and gestures and our shared love for New Zealand.

My friends Laura and Leigh-Ann were both stiff competition as wonderful evaluators today and I felt sure one of them would get the ribbon for best evaluation. But to my surprise…

Best Evaluator, March 2020
For the 5 March Meeting of Loudoun Toastmasters, I delivered an award-winning evaluation for my friend Rick Halstead. © 2020, Jeffrey C. Jacobs

…it was in fact me! Wow! Thank you Loudoun Toastmasters!

Talk to you again in a fortnight my fellow orators!

Who is the TimeHorse

TimeHorse February 20, 2020 No Comments

I joined Toastmasters last year to both practice my public speaking and to lear to be a better performer when acting. I enjoyed answering Table Topics and being challenged to come up with a spontaneous speech—at least when I knew what the topic was—but when it came to my own Ice Breaker speech, I kept putting it off.

The thing is, I don’t like talking about myself. I love writing fiction and talking about Science but when it comes to my personal life, I get embarrassed and ashamed. Much of my personal story is really not for public consumption and is rather confounded with emotional difficulty and lack of self-worth. I do hope through Toastmasters, to overcome that, just as I have found Cosplay to help with my self-image, but that journey isn’t the subject of this post.

Instead, I want to talk about my Ice Breaker.

I decided to cover my digital self. As you can see from the side menu in the upper-right corner of my site, I have a lot of social networks accounts! Indeed, the currently 26 or so I have listed there are only a fraction of the dozen or so twitter accounts I have, the half-dozen Facebook pages I run, the three instagram accounts I control, the dozens of meetups I’m in with my two accounts, one professional, one personal. Or even the fact that I have a separate blog for Reston Writers and one for the Affordable Electric Car NOW!

The long and short of it is, I wanted to talk all about these accounts, right back to the Original George Harrison and Tomorrow People home page and MINITEL in France and 1200 Baud Modems. I wanted to covey my diverse interests in so many subjects, and I planned a 6–7 minute speech to do it.

Of course, seasoned ToastMasters will know that your Ice Breaker is actually 4–6 minutes, not 5–7, so my speech ran long. And I did tend to lose my place as I spoke, having had no time to memorize it word for word. Nonetheless, I did my best and delivered my speech and got some great advice from my friends and colleagues at the Loudoun ToastMasters, club 5154. My mentor Jonathan gave me some amazing and helpful advice and I am so thankful to all of my fellow Toastmasters!

What do you have to say?